She seemed to realize that I wouldn't hurt her. The glazed look left her eyes and she got her feet under her. "Y-yes."
"Dari . . . have you see Dari?"
"No . . . I tried to . . . I waited . . ."
The Holmes kid would have taken her somewhere. Dr. McKeever had the Evans girl at his wife's sister's place. The kid would go there.
"Would you know Dr. McKeever's wife . . . or her sister?" I asked.
For a second Ruth Gleason stopped being scared and bobbed her head, puzzled. "Her sister is Emma Cox . . . Captain Cox's wife. They . . . don't live together anymore."
"Can you drive?"
She nodded again. I reached in my pocket and threw her the truck keys. "Willie Elkins' truck. It's out back. You call Doctor McKeever and tell him to meet us at his sister's. You'll have to drive."
I could hear her voice but couldn't concentrate on it. I felt her hand on my arm and knew I was in the truck. I could smell the night air and sometimes think and cursed myself mentally for having gone overboard with those damned capsules.
Time had no meaning at all. I heard Dr. McKeever and Dari and felt hands in the hole in my side and knew pieces of flesh were being cut away from the hole in my arm. There was Dari crying and the Gleason girl screaming.
All she could say was, "You're a doctor, give it to me, please. You have to! Oh, please . . . I'll do anything . . . please!"
Dari said, "Can you . . . ?"
There were other voices and McKeever finally said, "It'll help. Not much, but it will quiet her."
"And Kelly?" she asked.
"He'll be all right. I'll have to report this gunshot wound."
"No." There was a soft final note in her voice. "He has to get away."
Ruth Gleason was crying out for Lennie to please come get her.
The pain-killing fog I was wrapped in detached me from the scene then.
"You've been withdrawing, haven't you, Ruth?" Dr. McKeever asked.
Her voice was resigned. "I didn't want to. Lennie . . . took it away. He wanted to . . . get rid of me."
After a moment McKeever continued, "When did it start, Ruth?"
Her voice sounded real distant. "On the hill. Flori and I . . . went there. Flori needed the money . . . her father . . ."
"Yes, I know about that. What about you?"
"A man . . . before Lennie. We met downtown and he . . . invited me. It sounded like fun. He gave me some pot."
Dari said, "What?"
"Marihuana," the doctor told her. "Then what, Ruth?"
"Later we popped one. For kicks. Week later."
"Flori, too?"
Ruth giggled. "Sure," she said, "everybody. It was fun. He danced. Nude, you know? No clothes. Mr. Simpson came in and watched. He gave me five hundred dollars, can you imagine? Flori too. And that was only the first time. Oh, we did lots of dances. We wore costumes for Mr. Simpson and we made his friends laugh and we . . ."
You could barely hear her voice. "Mr. Simpson wanted . . . something special. On different nights . . . he'd take one of us. He made us undress . . . and he had whips. He said . . . it wouldn't hurt." She almost choked, remembering. "I screamed and tried to get away, but I couldn't!" She buried her face in her hands.
"You went back, Ruth?"
"I . . . had to. The money. It was always there. Then there was Lennie. Then I had to because . . . my supply was gone . . . I needed a shot bad. I . . . what's going to happen to me?"
"You'll be taken care of, Ruth. Tell me something . . . are any girls up there now?"
"Yes . . . yes. The ones who are usually there. But there will be more. Mr. Simpson likes . . . new ones. Please . . . you'll have to let me go back."
The voices were miles away now. Sleep was pressing down on me and I couldn't fight it off.
It was daylight. I cursed and yelled for somebody and the door opened and McKeever was trying to push me back on the cot. Behind him was Sonny Holmes.
I managed to sit up against the pressure of McKeever's hand. My mouth was dry and cottony, my head pounding. A tight band of wide tape was wound around my torso and the pain in my side was a dull throbbing, but it was worse than the hole in the fleshy part of my arm.
"I haven't seen anything like you since the war," McKeever said.
From the door Cox said, "Can he talk?"
Before McKeever could stop me I said, "I can talk, Captain. Come on in."
Cox's arrogant smile was gone now. Like everybody else in Pinewood, he had a nervous mouth.
I said, "I made you big trouble, boy, didn't I?"
"You had no right . . ."
"Tough. You checked my prints through, didn't you?"
He couldn't hide the fear in his eyes. McKeever was watching me too now. "I'm a federal agent, laddie, and you know it. At any time my department has authority to operate anywhere and by now you know with what cooperation, don't you?"
Cox didn't answer. He was watching his whole little world come tumbling down around him.
"You let a town run dirty, Cox. You let a worm get in a long time ago and eat itself into a monster. The worm got too big, so you tried to ignore it and you played a mutual game of Let Alone. It outgrew you, buddy. I bet you've known that for a long, long time. Me happening along was just an accident, but it would have caught up to you before long anyway."
Cox still wouldn't put his head down. "What should I do," he asked.
I got up on the edge of the bed, reached for my pants, and pulled them on. Somebody had washed my shirt. Luckily, I could slide my feet into my moccasins without bending down.
I looked hard at the big cop. "You'll do nothing," I said. "You'll go back to your office and wait there until I call and tell you what to do. Now get out of here."
We both watched Cox shuffle out. His head was down a little now. McKeever said, "Can you tell me?"
I nodded. "I have to. If anything happens to me, you'll have to pass it on. Now I'm going to guess, but it won't be wild. That big house on the hill is a front, a meeting place for the grand brotherhood of the poppy."
"It isn't the only one they have . . . it's probably just a local chapter. It's existed, operated, and been successful for . . . is it ten years now? Down here, the people maybe even suspected. But who wants to play with mob boys? It wouldn't take much to shut mouths up down here. To make it even better, that bunch spread the loot around. Even the dolls could be hooked into the action and nobody would really beef. Fear and money were a powerful deterrent. Besides, who could they beef to? A cop scared to lose his job? And other cops scared of him?"
"But one day the situation changed. Overseas imports of narcotics had been belted by our agencies and the brotherhood was hurting. But timed just right was the Cuban deal and those slobs on the hill got taken in by the Reds who saw a way of injecting a poison into this country while they built up their own machine. So Cuba became a collection point for China-grown narcotics. There's a supposedly clean businessman up there on the hill who owns an airline in Florida. The connection clear?"
I grinned, my teeth tight. "There's an even bigger one there, a Russian attache. He'll be the one who knows where and when the big delivery will be made. There's a rallying of key personnel who have to come out of hiding in order to attend a conclave of big wheels and determine short-range policy."
"It's a chance they have to take. You can't be in the business they're in without expecting to take a chance sooner or later. Lack of coincidence can eliminate chance. Coincidence can provide it. I was the coincidence. Only there was another element involved . . . a Mr. Simpson and his peculiar pleasures. If he had forgone those, chance never would have occurred."
